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Over the years I've accumulated a long
list of quotes about money and banking extracted from online articles and
books I've read. Unlike most other sites that post pithy remarks from
famous authors, I include hyperlinks to their sources, so that anyone who
wishes can not only verify a quote but, perhaps more importantly, read the
context in which it was used. And unlike other sites, most of these
quotes originated with today's financial writers and economists, writing from
a perspective consistent with Austrian School principles -- people like Peter Schiff, Lew
Rockwell, Steve Saville, Joseph Salerno, Gary
North, Edwin Vieira, Judy Shelton, Frank Shostak,
Ron Paul, and others, even Alan Greenspan. What these writers have in
common is their respect for a market-sponsored
commodity money, traditionally gold and silver coins.
My purpose in publishing these hyperlinked quotes is to draw attention to the
vast literature of criticism that has arisen over the money and banking
system we are forced to live under. The list is continually expanding
as writers are continually writing. I ask that you excuse the many
omissions such a list necessarily entails and hope you will alert me to
insightful quotes I have missed.
I personally find these words of wisdom intellectually stimulating.
Observations such as Ron Paul's "“Everything possible is done to
prevent the fraud of the monetary system from being exposed to the masses who
suffer from it" or Judy Shelton's "Inflation makes suckers out of
savers" are not merely true, but critical to a full understanding of
today's political institutions, especially when combined with Jorg Guido Hulsmann's
contention that inflation is always an imposed increase in the money
supply. They help keep me focused and fired up. I hope they will
do the same for you.
Here's the list.
George F. Smith
Read his book : The
Flight of the Barbarous Relic
Visit his website
Read his blog
Money and banking quotes, with
sources
“We
can either return to gold or we can pursue the fiat path and return to
barter. It is perhaps not hyperbole to say that civilization itself is at
stake in our decision.” - Murray Rothbard, The
Case for a 100 percent Gold Dollar
It is one of the home truths of the economics profession that virtually
all of its members are government employees. Jörg
Guido Hülsmann, The
Ethics of Money Production p. 16
The excellence of the gold standard is to be seen in the fact that it
renders the determination of the monetary unit’s purchasing power
independent of governments and political parties. - Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, p.
416
The ideal of [David Ricardo and] the bullionists
was “a self-regulating currency” whose quantity, value and
distribution among nations were governed exclusively by market forces of
supply and demand. - Joseph Salerno, Money, Sound
and UnSound
“Like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom in housing prices
cannot last forever.” Ron Paul, Sept. 10. 2003.
“Everything possible is done to prevent the fraud of the monetary
system from being exposed to the masses who suffer from it.” Ron Paul,
Feb. 15, 2006.
[Regarding monetary and banking policy] “Let failing banks die. Let
profitable banks live. Let the people choose to use any form of money. Let
the people choose any means of payment. Let entrepreneurs create any form of financial
instrument. Law applies only the way it applies to all other human affairs:
punishing force and fraud. Otherwise, the law should have nothing to do with
it.” - Llewellyn
H. Rockwell, Jr.
“When one studies the history of money, one cannot help wondering
why people should have put up for so long with governments exercising an
exclusive power over 2,000 years that was regularly used to exploit and
defraud them.” - Friedrich A. Hayek, Down
with Legal Tender
All that deflation does is shatter the illusion
of prosperity created by monetary pumping. Frank Shostak,
Is
Deflation Really Bad for the Economy?
"There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in the
nature of a crash."
- Irving Fisher, leading U.S. economist , New York Times, Sept. 5, 1929;
quoted by Colin J. Seymour in 1927-1933 Chart
of Pompous Prognosticators.
No nation honors the requirements of a State-run gold standard: the free
convertibility of the State’s money into gold. - Gary North, The Gold Wars, p. 22.
In this century, the human race faces, once again, the virulent reign of
the State – of the State now armed with the fruits of man's creative
powers, confiscated and perverted to its own aims. - Murray Rothbard, The Anatomy of
the State.
“Inflation is simply a means to transfer wealth from anyone who has
savings in a particular currency to anyone who has debt in the same currency.
With hyperinflation, the value of savings gets completely wiped out and the
burden of debt is removed.” - Peter D. Schiff and Andrew J. Schiff, How
an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes, p. 220.
“The Fed's low-interest policy not only encourages spending and
borrowing, it discourages the one thing that best helps people raise
themselves into higher economic classes — saving.” - Mark
Thornton, The Fed’s War on the Middle Class
“Nothing has done more to render modern economic theory a sterile
and irrelevant exercise in autoeroticism than its practitioners’
obsession with mathematical, general-equilibrium models.” - Robert
Higgs, “The Dangers
of Samuelson's Economic Method”
“In stark contrast with the views of the Greek philosophers and
with those of the rest of western intellectuals to the present day, Chinese
Taoist thought always defended individual liberty and laissez-faire while
attacking the systematic and coercive use of violence typical of
government.” - Jesus Huerta de Soto, “Economic
Thought in Ancient Greece”
“If all currencies are moving up or down together, the question is:
relative to what? Gold is the canary in the coal mine. It signals problems
with respect to currency markets. Central banks should pay attention to
it.” - Alan
Greenspan, Sept. 15, 2010.
“What is money? The best answer to this continual question was
provided in 1912 by the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises.
In his book, ‘The Theory of Money and Credit,’ he provided an
answer in six words: money is the most marketable commodity.” - Gary
North, “What is
Money?”
"The one thing that the globalization of central banking has
succeeded in doing is synchronizing disaster." - Gold: The
Anti-Bubble
“Consumer spending involves taking something out of the economy. If
people throughout the economy began taking more stuff out than they put in,
how could the economy possibly grow?” - Steve Saville,
“Popular
Misconceptions”
“As it turns out, when you use the historical CPI that was actually
in effect during the 1980s, that $850 gold price record in 1980 is equal to
$7,576 in 2010 dollars.” - Richard Daughty, quoting Brien Lundin
of Jefferson Financial
“Counterfeiting is universally condemned by civil governments. . .
Why do governments do this? Because they are all counterfeiters, and they
deeply resent an invasion of their turf. Laws against counterfeiting in
today's world are a form of gang warfare.” - Gary North, What Is Money? Part 2:
Precious Metal Coinage
“The goal of the bankers was to get as much of the gold into their
hands, issue as many warehouse receipts to this gold they could get away
with, and then create a central bank, so they could get away with issuing
even more IOUs for gold. They wanted more inflation, but they did not want
the threat of bank runs, which is ultimately the threat of monetary deflation..” - Gary North, What Is Money? Part 4:
Bait and Switch
“Whenever you hear someone speak of gold's having intrinsic value,
you can be sure that he has a confused theory of economics in general and
monetary theory in particular. There is no such thing as a free lunch. There
is also no such thing as intrinsic value. . . . Gold's startling fall in
price from $850 to $250, 1980–2001, reveals just how non-intrinsic
gold's value has been. The money supply doubled, prices doubled, and gold's
price fell by 70%.” - Gary North, What Is Money? Part 8:
Why Gold Has No Intrinsic Value
“The degree of barbarism that [WWI] produced could not have been
accomplished had a gold standard been in force. The public would have
stripped the banks of the public’s gold. The governments would have had
to come to terms with the enemy. It was the abandonment of the gold standard
that made modern barbarism affordable.” - Gary North, The Gold Wars, p. 23
Even if voters understood the case for a limited State, they would not be
able to limit the State by a State-run gold standard. A State-run monetary
system, with the exception only of Byzantium, becomes a debased standard. -
North, The Gold Wars, p. 26
It will not be enemies at the gates who overwhelm the American empire. It
will be the army of politically armed economic dependents inside the gates.
Granny will bring it down. - North, The Gold Wars, p. 34
When economists call for boosting "aggregate demand," they do
not spell out what this really means. It means forcibly overriding the
voluntary decisions of consumers and savers, violating their property rights
and their freedom of association in order to realize the national
government's economic ambitions. - Llewellyn
H. Rockwell, Jr.
“The hatred of gold is ideological. It is based on a love of
government. It is based on trust in the Federal Reserve System. It is
supported by most academic economists, and it is supported by an even higher
percentage of politicians at the national level.” - Gary North, Who Are the Experts on
Gold?
“The goal of the Federal Reserve is to keep the largest commercial
banks from failing. They are too big to fail. In
his September 2 testimony to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission,
[Bernanke] made it clear that "too big to fail" will remain FED
policy.” - Gary North, The Federal Reserve's
Reserve
“If precious metals had been abundant, they would not have been
precious.” - Henry Hazlitt, Failure
of the New Economics, p. 346; cited in Where Keynes
Went Wrong, Hunter Lewis, p. 245
“Keynesian theory makes smart people functionally stupid. You don't
have to be smarter than they are. You just have to avoid Keynesianism.”
- Gary North, “Two Bad Investments,
Stocks, Bonds”
“The best place for your money is in yourself. If you invest in a
career by serving customers, and you invest your profits in your own
business, you will beat the stock market. Even if you don't, you will not be
significantly worse off. You will have a shot at wealth. You don't with the
stock market.” - Gary North, “Two Bad Investments,
Stocks, Bonds”
“Why invest in the West? The West is on life-support from Asian
central banks. It is facing an ever-growing degree of taxation and intervention.
The governments cannot fulfill their welfare promises to voters. When the
deficits no longer can be sold at low rates, the day of reckoning in Western
nations will arrive.” - Gary North, “Two Bad Investments,
Stocks, Bonds”
“Promoting a revamped Keynesian economic theory – one without
any guarantee of job growth – is the equivalent of selling a lifetime
subscription to a revamped Playboy: one without any photos. It's a tough
sell. Yet this is what Keynesians are facing today.” - Gary North,
“A Double-Dip Recession”
“David Stockman, who was briefly Reagan's budget director before he
resigned, recently wrote an
article on the gargantuan size of the Federal deficit. He made an
important but neglected observation. Ever since the third quarter of 2008,
the nation's nominal GDP has increased by a tiny $100 billion, but the Federal
debt has increased by 25 times the GDP increase.” - Gary North, “A Double-Dip Recession”
“It has taken $25 of Federal deficits to produce $1 of GDP growth.
This marks a major anomaly for Keynesian economic theory. The justification
for government deficits in Keynesian theory is that government spending
restores economic growth. Money spent by the private sector does not increase
economic growth in a recession; government spending does.” - Gary
North, “A Double-Dip Recession”
“the Austrian School view is that the
recovery itself may turn out to have been a statistical anomaly. We are not
facing a double-dip recession, only because we have not gotten out of the
2007 recession. We are now facing a more rapid decline of an economy already
in decline.” - Gary North, “A Double-Dip Recession”
“Keynes baptized deficit-spending policies that all governments had
begun several years before [1936]. He was John the Baptist for his
generation. He called on old school economists to repent and be baptized in
the logic of deficits. He converted most of the young economists. The old
ones slowly died off.” - Gary North, “A Double-Dip Recession”
“Economists as a profession have rushed to the Keynesian pump to
keep the ship from sinking, but the ship appears to be taking on water
despite their best efforts.” - Gary North, “A Double-Dip Recession”
“The return to gold does not depend on the fulfillment of some
material condition. It is an ideological problem. It presupposes only one
thing: the abandonment of the illusion that increasing the quantity of money
creates prosperity.” -- Ludwig von Mises,
“Gold versus Paper”
“What the costs of mining produce for society is a restrained
state. . . That such a restraint might be available for the few millions
spent in mining gold and silver out of the ground represents the greatest
potential economic and political bargain in the history of man.” - Gary
North, The Gold Wars
“Government is an inherently inflationary institution and will ever
remain so until it is dispossessed of its monopoly of the supply of
money.” -- Joseph Salerno, Money, Sound and
Unsound, p. 343
“The market insures that any quantity of money is capable of
performing all the work required of a medium of exchange by adjusting its
purchasing power to the underlying conditions of supply and demand.” -
Joseph Salerno, Money, Sound and
Unsound, p. 348
“It is precisely through falling prices that the fruits of
increased productivity and economic growth are spread throughout the market
economy.” - Joseph Salerno, Money, Sound and
Unsound, p. 348
“If a domestic money consists of a
commodity, a pure gold standard or cowrie bead standard, the principles of
monetary policy are very simple. There aren’t any. The commodity money
takes care of itself.” - Milton Friedman, quoted by Joseph Salerno, Money, Sound and
Unsound, p. 366
“Funding government through taxation is never enough because the
victims might retaliate. What's needed is what we have: the arcane subterfuge
of a cloistered cartel. What's needed is a central bank quietly mulcting the
masses while it feeds the world's power-holders.” - George F. Smith,
“Government’s
Perennial Enemy”
“The central bank never set out to protect the integrity of our
money. In fact, the Fed set out to destroy it by institutionalizing
inflation. The gold coin standard was doomed and today's inflation made
inevitable the day the Federal Reserve was created.” - Ron Paul, Gold,
Peace, and Prosperity, p. 46
“Government too has developed a systemic hand that is usually not
seen. But unlike the invisible hand of the market, when this hand moves, we
lose. Through inflation, government snatches the market's bounty for its own
purposes, enervating our lives accordingly.” - George F. Smith, “That Other
Invisible Hand”
“Sound money starves the state.” - George F. Smith, “Government’s
Perennial Enemy”
“We should never forget, in the midst of all our warnings about
government power, that government is deeply incompetent, and laughably
so.” - Llewellyn H. Rockwell, “The
Self-Regulating Economy”
“If modern economists are scientists, it makes us suspicious of the
rest of them. What about the physicists? The molecular biologists? The
archeologists? Are they all quacks too?” - Bill Bonner, “Junk Science”
“Private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental
institution of the market economy. It is the institution the presence of
which characterizes the market economy as such. Where it is absent, there is
no question of a market economy.” - Ludwig
von Mises, Human Action
(1949), Ch. 24, p. 678
“The Federal Reserve should be abolished because it is immoral,
unconstitutional, impractical, promotes bad
economics, and undermines liberty. Its destructive nature makes it a tool of
tyrannical government.” - Ron Paul, End
the Fed, p. 141
“You don't help a depressed economy by giving control of its
resources to politicians.” - Robert P. Murphy, Have
Events Vindicated Keynesian Models?
“With artificially low rates come complete
destruction of capital formation, as economic laws have all been
commandeered.” - Jim Willie, Asset Speculation and
Capital Destruction, The Cost Of 0% Money
“Modern economics is a set of formal models and equations
purporting to fully determine human behaviour, at
least in the economic realm. And there is no way that uncertainty can be
compressed into determinate mathematical models.” - Murray Rothbard, Economic
Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 352
“Rothbard’s Progression Theorem . .
. identifies the central bank as the prime institutional means for effecting
the progressive transformation of the monetary unit from a fixed-weight of a
market-supplied commodity to a pure name. The disembodied monetary unit then
can be affixed to an almost worthless object and multiplied, practically
without cost and limit, by political fiat.” - Joseph Salerno, Money,
Sound and Unsound, p. 54.
“Posterity does not pay off anything of the national debt. Each
administration adds to the debt left to it, and the promise of liquidation
implied in every bond issue is a false promise.” - Frank Chodorov, Out of Step, Ch. 17:
“Don’t Buy Government Bonds”
“Contrary to popular thinking, it is not a fall in credit as such
that is the key to deflation, but a fall specifically in credit created out
of thin air.” - Frank Shostak, “Does a
Fall in Credit Lead to Deflation?”
“The whole point of a central bank is to make the banking system
unaccountable to market forces. Whenever the banks are in trouble, there is a
lender of last resort. No other business entity enjoys such a
privilege.” - Frank Shostak, “An Interview with Frank Shostak”
“Instead of recognizing the State as ‘the common enemy of all
well-disposed, industrious and decent men,’ the run of mankind, with
rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity, but
also as, in the main, beneficent. The mass-man, ignorant of its history,
regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and
in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of
knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at
will.” - Albert Jay Nock, Our
Enemy, the State
“What determines the course of a nation's
economic policies is always the economic ideas held by public opinion. No
government, whether democratic or dictatorial, can free itself from the sway
of the generally accepted ideology.” - Ludwig von Mises,
Human
Action, Scholar’s Edition, p. 846
“History does not provide any example of capital accumulation
brought about by a government.” - Ludwig von Mises,
Human
Action, Scholar’s Edition, p. 847
“Keynesianism is mercantilism with equations.” - Gary North, “Theft by
Mercantilism: Old and New”
“To be an economist with integrity means having to say things that
people don't want to hear, and especially to say things that the regime does
not want to hear.” - Llewellyn
H. Rockwell, Jr.
“Every frugal man [is] a public benefactor.” - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations,
Book II, Chapter 3
“The present economic crisis presents the best opportunity since
1932 for taking the steps necessary and sufficient to free the American
people from their thralldom to the Federal Reserve System and the vicious
factions behind it.” - Edwin Vieira, “A Cross of
Gold”
“When people deal with a ‘paper currency redeemable in
gold’, the natural uninstructed inclination is to treat the paper
currency as ‘money’ and the gold as something else.” -
Edwin Vieira, “A Cross of
Gold”
“Without popular fear, no government would endure more than
twenty-four hours.” - Robert Higgs, Neither
Liberty nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government, p.
2
“A gold necklace worn by some lovely young bride in 1500 will look
just as good on a bride today. Think of a bride wearing Federal Reserve
Notes. This image just doesn't have the same sense of permanence.” -
Gary North, Gold: A Valuable Thing
to Store
“The accounting systems of all modern nations are exercises in
deception of the public.” - Gary North, The European Banking
Crisis: Next Phase
“There are only two conceptual options in monetary theory: a full
gold coin standard in which the citizens hold the golden hammers or a system
of economic planning in which elite members of the planning bureaucracy hold
the digital hammers. There is no third choice. A mixture always leads to
inflation, recession, and centralization.” - Gary North, “Gold vs. Badges and
Guns”
“There is no permanent exit strategy, other than Great Depression
2.” - Gary North, “Why Economists Love
the Federal Reserve”
“There are no free lunches. There are no mercantilistic
policies to subsidize exports that do not thereby subsidize the lifestyles of
the customers in the other nations that buy the exports.” - Gary North,
GoldBRICs
“Economic theory has nothing to say as to what commodity will acquire
the status of money. Historically, it happened to be gold. But if the
physical makeup of our world would have been different or is to become
different from what it is now, some other commodity would have become or
might become money. The market will decide.” - Hans-Hermann Hoppe,
“The Mind of
Hans-Hermann Hoppe”
“More paper money cannot make a society richer, of course —
it is just more printed paper. Otherwise, why is it that there are still poor
countries and poor people around? But more money makes its monopolistic
producer (the central bank) and its earliest recipients (the government and
big, government-connected banks and their major clients) richer at the
expense of making the money's late and latest receivers poorer.” - Hans-Hermann
Hoppe
“Thanks to the central bank, most ‘monetary experts’
and ‘leading macro-economists’ can, by putting them on the
payroll, be turned into government propagandists ‘explaining,’
like alchemists, how stones (paper) can be turned into bread (wealth).”
- Hans-Hermann
Hoppe
If we have learned anything from history, we should know that printing
money out of thin air cannot lead to prosperity. It can only lead to penury.
- Ron Paul
Until government policymakers stop trying to reflate the failed boom, there will be no recovery. - William L.
Anderson
There is only one way to eliminate chronic inflation, as well as the
booms and busts brought by that system of inflationary credit: and that is to
eliminate the counterfeiting that constitutes and creates that inflation. And
the only way to do that is to abolish legalized counterfeiting: that is, to
abolish the Federal Reserve System, and return to the gold standard, to a
monetary system where a market-produced metal, such as gold, serves as the
standard money, and not paper tickets printed by the
Federal Reserve. - Murray Rothbard
But the gold standard is not a game; it is a market phenomenon, and as
such a social institution. Its preservation does not depend on the
observation of some specific rules. It requires nothing else than that the
government abstain from deliberately sabotaging it. - Ludwig
von Mises
Inflation makes suckers out of savers. - Judy Shelton
For many decades, socialist economies bragged about zero unemployment,
but the economies regressed year after year. Even in mixed economies like
ours, high employment is most often an effect of prosperity and never a
cause. - Llewellyn
H. Rockwell, Jr.
Inflation is the enemy of capitalism, chiseling away at the foundation of
free markets and the laws of supply and demand. It distorts price signals,
making retailers look like profiteers and deceiving workers into thinking
their wages have gone up. It pushes families into higher income tax brackets
without increasing their real consumption opportunities. - Judy Shelton
The … calling away of energy into military pursuits means a
crippling of the productive and life-enhancing processes of the national
life. - Randolph Bourne, from a discarded manuscript
found after his death.
On February 14, 2011, President Obama released his 2012 Federal Budget.
The report updated the projected 2011 deficit to $1.645 trillion. - Wikipedia
1.
1.
Deficit spending is
simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this
insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. - Alan Greenspan
2.
2.
The very existence of
central banking is contrary to the capitalist ideal, in which money would be
no different from any other good: produced and supplied by the market in
accord with the moral law against theft and fraud. For the government to
authorize a counterfeiter-in-chief is a direct attack on the sound money
system of a market economy. - Jeffrey
A. Tucker
Unlike natural
(voluntary) money production that is regulated by the market forces of profit
and loss, inflation is always an imposed increase of the
money supply. - Jorg Guido Hulsmann (paraphrasing)
Commodity monies have
built-in insurance against inflation. - Jorg Guido Hulsmann
(paraphrasing)
”Nobody gets a
Nobel Prize for letting the chips fall where they may. Nobody attracts
readers by telling them that there is nothing that can be done. And nobody
gets elected by promising to do nothing.” - Bill
Bonner
“Anyone who thinks
the Federal debt ceiling is now or ever has been a ceiling has not come to
grips with the political reality of the free ride. Until there is widespread
political pain, there will be no debt ceiling.” - Gary North
“You can't create
wealth out of printing presses.” - Ron
Paul
“I want competition
with the Fed. I want to legalize the Constitution.” - Ron
Paul
”The problem isn't that today's money is not ‘backed’
by much in the way of reserves; the problem is that the value of YOUR money
is determined by the actions of ethically-bankrupt institutions.” - Steve Saville
"Have you guys seen food and gas prices lately? U.S $ will soon be
worthless if the Fed keeps printing money." - Lindsay Lohan
”For those versed in the writings of Mises,
Hayek, and Rothbard, the continuing economic slump
has been no surprise.” - Robert
Murphy
“FREE LUNCHES ARE SO EXPENSIVE” - Gary North
“All great mistakes start with having the money to finance
them.” - Richard Daughty, the Mogambo Guru
“Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.” -
Albert Paine, Mark
Twain’s Notebook
“In practice [monetary management] is merely a high-sounding
euphemism for continuous currency debasement. It consists of constant lying
in order to support constant swindling. Instead of automatic currencies based
on gold, people are forced to take managed currencies based on guile. Instead
of precious metals they hold paper promises whose value falls with every
bureaucratic whim. And they are suavely assured that only hopelessly
antiquated minds dream of returning to truth and honesty and solvency and
gold.” - Henry Hazlitt (pdf,
p. 24) (Thanks to Sean Mahoney)
Any country can have heavy unemployment if it is willing and able to pay
for it. - Benjamin
Anderson, p. 162, in reference to Britain’s policy of supporting
high wage rates after WW I.
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